Imagine you can insert a memory card in your brain and go all Keanu Wow, I know Jiu-Jitsu! Reeves. It's actually not that far away: Scientists have created a chip that allows rats to instantly know things. It's amazing.
After studying the chemical interactions that allow short-term learning and memorization in rats, a group of scientists lead by Dr. Theodore Berger—from the University of South California's Viterbi School of Engineering—have built a prosthetic chip that uses electrodes to enhance and expand their memory abilities. The chip is capable of storing neural signals, basically functioning as an electronic memory, allowing rats to learn more and keep it in the devices.

Dr. Berger's description is almost frightening:

"Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget [...] These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes.

The team's experiments—which have been in a paper called "A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing Memory"—could lead to the development of devices that may help people affected by Alzheimer's disease, stroke or other brain injuries. In fact, they are already working on the next step: Reproduce the same result in monkeys.

As someone who has had family affected by Alzheimer and other diseases, I really hope they succeed. As someone who would like to have the entire IMDB in his brain, I really hope they succeed too.

A certain kind of worm may carry keys to immortality, scientists have found, even though they’d spend eternity squirming — but without having sex.

For humans, the study of these asexual worms won’t necessarily mean a ticket to the fountain of youth, but may yield insights into how to slow down the ravages of aging, Reuters reports.

In a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, British scientists found that planarian worms, also known as flatworms, have the ability to preserve key parts of their DNA when regenerating that offer the potential for immortality, Reuters reports.
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"Our data satisfy one of the predictions about what it would take for an animal to be potentially immortal," said Aziz Aboobaker, who led the research, according to Reuters.

Scientists at Britain's University of Nottingham were able to generate more than 20,000 flatworms from a single one that they had cut up into several pieces. Each piece they cut grew into its own new independent living worm, the Telegraph reports.

British scientists studied sexual and asexual flatworms, and both were able to reproduce muscles, skin, and brains indefinitely when they were cut into pieces, but the asexual worms proved to have the potential to be immortal, Aboobaker said, according to Reuters.

The reason they may hang around forever is that the asexual adult flatworm stem cells appear to maintain lengths of telomere, a key DNA component associated with protecting cells from aging.

This ingredient allows the invertebrates to replace damaged cells, and theoretically continue life without end, according to the study.

Scientists hope to use the findings to build “strong foundations for improving health and potentially longevity in other organisms, including humans," Aboobaker said in a statement, according to Reuters.

"The next goals for us are to understand the mechanisms in more detail and to understand more about how you evolve an immortal animal."

What does a robot feel when it touches something? Little or nothing until now. But with the right sensors, actuators and software, robots can be given the sense of feel - or at least the ability to identify materials by touch.

Researchers at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering published a study today in Frontiers in Neurobiotics showing that a specially designed robot can outperform humans in identifying a wide range of natural materials according to their textures, paving the way for advancements in prostheses, personal assistive robots and consumer product testing.

The robot was equipped with a new type of tactile sensor built to mimic the human fingertip. It also used a newly designed algorithm to make decisions about how to explore the outside world by imitating human strategies. Capable of other human sensations, the sensor can also tell where and in which direction forces are applied to the fingertip and even the thermal properties of an object being touched.

Like the human finger, the group’s BioTac® sensor has a soft, flexible skin over a liquid filling. The skin even has fingerprints on its surface, greatly enhancing its sensitivity to vibration. As the finger slides over a textured surface, the skin vibrates in characteristic ways. These vibrations are detected by a hydrophone inside the bone-like core of the finger. The human finger uses similar vibrations to identify textures, but the BioTac is even more sensitive.

Built by Fishel, the specialized robot was trained on 117 common materials gathered from fabric, stationery and hardware stores. When confronted with one material at random, the robot could correctly identify the material 95% of the time, after intelligently selecting and making an average of five exploratory movements. It was only rarely confused by a pair of similar textures that human subjects making their own exploratory movements could not distinguish at all.

So, is touch another task that humans will outsource to robots? Fishel and Loeb point out that while their robot is very good at identifying which textures are similar to each other, it has no way to tell what textures people will prefer. Instead, they say this robot touch technology could be used in human prostheses or to assist companies who employ experts to judge the feel of consumer products and even human skin.

8,500-Year-Old Lost Civilization Doggerland Discovered At Bottom Of North Sea
Posted by JacobSloan on July 4, 2012

Millennia ago, it was the heart of the continent, until sea levels rose, giving us the Europe we know today. A preview of how New York City will be spoken of when it is newly uncovered ten thousand years from now. The Daily Mail reports:

‘Britain’s Atlantis’ – a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea – has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews. Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that stretched from Scotland to Denmark was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC.

Divers from oil companies have found remains of a ‘drowned world’ with a population of tens of thousands – which might once have been the ‘real heartland’ of Europe. A team of climatologists, archaeologists and geophysicists has now mapped the area using new data from oil companies – and revealed the full extent of a ‘lost land’ once roamed by mammoths.

Dr Bates, a geophysicist, said: “Doggerland was the real heartland of Europe until sea levels rose to give us the UK coastline of today. We have speculated for years on the lost land’s existence from bones dredged by fishermen all over the North Sea, but it’s only since working with oil companies in the last few years that we have been able to re-create what this lost land looked like.”

Some 460 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, a thick disk of dust swirled around a young star named TYC 8241 2652 1, where rocky planets like our own were arising. Then, in less than 2 years, the disk just vanished. That's the unprecedented observation astronomers report in a new study, out today. Even more intriguing: The same thing may have happened in our own solar system.

Crazy stuff there. It's incredible that scientists can view the birth process of systems hundreds of light years away. You see the news about the God Particle discovery?

And does the news about the submerged land mass add any credence to the possibility of Atlantis being real?

I don't think enough people are willing to believe there was an advanced civilization. But with all these lost cities being found around the world, it should at least prove that humans have been around and were smarter than we thought much earlier.

I've read briefly about the God particle, I'll have to read it again.. and probably a few more times to really grasp it (if that). I should probably post a link to that in here too..

It was the biggest of Big Science, a $10 billion effort involving 6,000 researchers, a 17-mile circular tunnel deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland, thousands of torpedo-size magnets capable of bending beams of subatomic matter, and trillions of subatomic collisions — all in the quest for a momentary hint, the slightest residual footprint, of an elusive particle called the Higgs boson.

And it worked. Wednesday’s announcement by scientists in Europe that they’d found the Higgs boson, or something remarkably Higgs-like, was a stunning triumph of both theory and experiment.

Peter Higgs, a theorist who envisioned the particle as a young man in 1964, teared up as he attended the discovery announcement in Geneva.

“It’s really an incredible thing that it’s happened in my lifetime,” Higgs, 83, said when he took the microphone before a packed auditorium at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates the Higgs-hunting Large Hadron Collider.

The Higgs — famously dubbed “the God particle,” to the chagrin of scientists — is so fundamental to the universe that, in its absence, nothing could exist. The particle is thought to create a sort of force field that permeates the cosmos and imbues other particles with the property known as mass — the resistance to being shoved around.

Yeah, pretty much just validated the standard model of physics as the higgs boson was the one missing link. A lot of physicists think this is just the beginning of 'new physics'. With the 'god particle' out the way and us knowing why matter exists, they want to now figure out why anti-matter and dark matter/dark energy exists (matter only makes up 4% of the universe). This could lead to the discovery of alternate dimensions

Should be a very interesting time for physicists going forward from the discovery of the god particle.

Yeah, pretty much just validated the standard model of physics as the higgs boson was the one missing link. A lot of physicists think this is just the beginning of 'new physics'. With the 'god particle' out the way and us knowing why matter exists, they want to now figure out why anti-matter and dark matter/dark energy exists (matter only makes up 4% of the universe). This could lead to the discovery of alternate dimensions

Should be a very interesting time for physicists going forward from the discovery of the god particle.

This is just me being dumb but when I read about the alternate dimensions, I think of the SciFi type things(tv/books/xmen new class cartoon) where they open up a dimensional portal, walk 10 feet come out of a dimensional portal and then they are across the continent.

If we can avoid a global war or survive it our future looks really awesome.